What the Bible says about Debased Mind
(From Forerunner Commentary)

Genesis 1:26-28

Two things are made especially plain. God states three times in verse 27 that man is created. In verses 26-27, He says four times that man is created in the image of God. He wants us to grasp those points because the same applies to us! Even though we are now about 6,000 years from when He first spoke those words, these realities have not changed one iota.

In addition, God clearly gave us beings created in His image authority over animals. That authority has not been taken from us. This dominion implies responsibility in managing them that we owe to our Creator.

Many people seek to escape the responsibility of answering to our Creator, devising complex explanations to deny His existence to themselves and others. They may reason that, if He does not exist, how can they be responsible for submitting to His commands?

They will move heaven and earth, as the saying goes, looking for proof to back their denial of God. The great bulk of mankind lacks the resources, the time, or the education to make such a search, so for their own benefit, they simply deny His existence by ignoring Him. These two categories of people are part of the “Nones”—those who claim no spiritual attachment whatever—of this generation.

Others, without making any real effort to search out the truth, create a god or goddess they are comfortable with and worship him or her to salve their consciences. They do not seem to grasp that their dodges do not alter their responsibility to conform to what God laid out in the beginning.

Another category is quite worrisome: the sincere folk who consider themselves Christian. However, either due to false teaching in their churches or perhaps their own laziness, they believe that much of the Old Testament no longer applies to them. In their minds, it has been “done away” along with what they consider Old Covenant laws, deliberately ignoring what Jesus Himself says about those same laws (Matthew 5:17-20).

However, God's Word still stands, and mankind is still responsible to follow this covenant, as Romans 1:20-21 declares:

For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead [margin, divine nature], so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

John W. Ritenbaugh
Leadership and Covenants (Part Five)

Amos 8:11-14

The New Testament contains echoes of the curse found in Amos 8—a famine, not of the word, but of hearing it. Romans 1:18-32 tells of unrighteous men who suppress the truth. Because they are not thankful for what the creation reveals of the Creator, their foolish hearts become darkened. They lose what light, what truth, they have.

God's response to this is similar to His response to Israel. He does not contend with them or force His truth on them. Instead, Paul writes, God gave them up to uncleanness (Romans 1:24). He gave them up to vile passions (Romans 1:26). He gave them over to a debased mind (Romans 1:28). It is as if God gives them exactly what they seek, and they do not realize that it is a curse.

A second example of this principle appears in II Thessalonians 2:9-12, where Paul warns of a future Man of Sin who deceives the spiritually weak:

The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

Those who perish do so because they do not receive—in the sense of "welcome"—the love of the truth. Because they do not, God will send them strong delusion, so that they will believe the lie and be condemned. In reality, God is just giving them what they desire anyway. They prefer carnal delusion to spiritual reality, so God obliges them. The unrighteous in Romans 1 desire a worldview without a Creator so they can be sexually liberated. God gives them over to it and lets them reap the awful consequences. The Israelites in the time of Amos did not value God's truth, so He removed it, letting them experience how miserably they fare without it. If they were anything like modern Israelites, they thought of themselves as enlightened and progressive even as their blindness became more complete.

David C. Grabbe
A Subtle Yet Devastating Curse

Matthew 24:12

Today we live in cultures that lure people into a spiritual stupor that gradually desensitizes people to true spiritual and moral values. Jesus warns that the time would come when, because lawlessness abounds, the love of many in the church would grow cold (Matthew 24:12). He also warns through Paul that in this time people would be so perverse as to be without even natural affection (II Timothy 3:3). We live in those times, and it requires a clear vision and a steadfast conduct to avoid being sucked into following the worldly crowd. God has given our cultures over to allowing the carnal mind to spend itself on continuous sensation-seeking stimulation. The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life are virtually running wild.

One paraphrase of Romans 1:28 changed the term "reprobate mind" (KJV; debased mind, NKJV) to "degrading passions seeking stimulation." Another rendered it as "irrational stimulation resulting in monstrous behavior." Without a strong resistance to this almost unrelenting pressure, such stimulation will gradually produce a stupor, an apathy, an unfeeling indifference toward the highest priorities of life, that is, our relationships with God and fellow man. If a person does not defend himself against lawlessness, he will lose his God-given love. A Christian must guard himself strongly against becoming caught up in the stupor-inducing spirit of the times of which Paul forewarns us.

John W. Ritenbaugh
Eating: How Good It Is! (Part Three)

Romans 1:18-28

Verse 18 gives us the context, the proclivity of mankind to suppress the truth. Some translations say they suppress the truth “by” (rather than “in”) their unrighteousness, reinforcing the link between disobedience and blindness (Deuteronomy 28:28-29; Psalm 111:10). God has given all humanity a measure of understanding, at least about His existence, but most turn away in favor of something false that seems more reasonable to them. Even though Satan and his demons whisper their deceptions in the background, the people blind themselves through their choices. Satan forces no one; as with Eve, he adds fuel to an already-kindled fire of carnality and resistance to the truth.

People choose to close their eyes, and as the apostle Paul writes in verse 24, God responds by giving them over to that choice. He does not approve of or accept what they do but allows it to play out. At some point, they will understand the futility of rejecting God's way.

Paul states this principle again in verse 26: God gives them up to what is in their hearts, not realizing that they have cursed themselves by their choices. Ironically, they probably feel relief and liberation, having cut themselves off from bearing any accountability to uphold God's standards.

What begins with suppressing the truth in verse 18 ends with a debased mind in verse 28. As part of His judgment, God gives people over to the dominion of their choices' consequences. These verses depict God essentially taking His hands away to allow people to mess up their lives still further. However, other scriptures show God actively amplifying sin's effects; sometimes, God makes the spiritual plight of those rebelling against Him even worse.

In Amos 8:11, God calls for a famine of hearing His Word. It is a different metaphor but still analogous to blinding in that He diminishes the understanding of the people. The famine of hearing is a devastating curse because God takes away the very thing that could help the nation: The ability to hear His truth. His action may seem cruel, but the fault does not lie with Him but with the peoples' previous choices. We have a saying today, “Be careful what you wish for.” Israel yearned after her neighbors' paganism and so did not heed the revelation He had given to her, thus He began to take away her understanding.

David C. Grabbe
Spiritual Blindness (Part Three): Choosing a Curse


 

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